Frank Lantz is an American game designer, writer, and teacher of game design. He is best known for exploring the relationship between games, technology, and culture. His book The Beauty of Games (2023) presents his theory of games as an aesthetic form.
Frank Lantz studied and worked in New York, where he built a career as both a designer and teacher. He taught for over twenty years at New York University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts. In 2005, he co-founded Area/Code Games with Kevin Slavin. The studio was acquired by Zynga in 2011. Before this, Lantz worked as Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at This is Pop, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.
At Area/Code, he worked on experimental cross-media and location-based games, as well as Drop7 (2009), a puzzle game that remains widely regarded. He also helped pioneer large-scale real-world games. His projects included the Big Urban Game, which transformed Minneapolis and Saint Paul into a playable board game; Sharkrunners, a persistent online world where players tracked living sharks; and PacManhattan, a street-scale version of the arcade game, created with his students at NYU.
In 2017, Lantz released Universal Paperclips, an incremental game simulating the runaway logic of artificial intelligence. It became a cultural reference point for how games can embody systems and ideas. Alongside his design work, he has delivered influential talks and written pieces, emphasising that games are both entertainment and a lens for thought.
In October 2023, Lantz published The Beauty of Games with MIT Press. The book asks how games create beauty and meaning, and why they matter as an aesthetic form. He rejects the question “Are games art?” as the wrong starting point. Instead, he argues that games, like literature or music, form a continuum from profound to trivial. For him, games are the aesthetic form of interactive systems, a structured space of rules and possibilities.
In the book, he examines games ranging from chess to poker to tennis. He places them in dialogue with older artistic traditions while stressing their unique qualities as living systems. He writes that games allow people to “see the world as a collection of interconnected elements,” generating meaning through interaction.
Reflecting on games, Lantz explained: “I would describe games as an art form centred around systems. Viewing the world as a system means perceiving it as a collection of interconnected elements. These elements interact in a way that both enable and restrict themselves and each other.” This statement aligns with his central thesis, that games help people grasp complexity and beauty through play.
Frank Lantz co-founded Everybody's House Games, a studio that explores experimental ideas in interactive play. His work bridges academic theory and practical design, uniting research with popular culture. The Beauty of Games marks a continuation of his long-standing effort to demonstrate why games matter, not only as pastimes but also as a means of thinking.
Photo credit: www.franklantz.net
